In this whitepaper we have included six critical factors in assessing your campaign performance. Use this information to see how your current email marketing efforts stack up.

Define Email Marketing Goals
What do you want to accomplish with your email marketing campaign? This is an essential question that must be answered prior to crafting your message, call to action, and imagery. If your group’s focus is lead generation as opposed to sales conversion, then the preferred tactics used in your campaign will differ greatly. By defining your goals, you are also better able to determine the metrics by which to gauge the campaign’s performance. In addition, you gain the ability to finely tune landing experiences that drive toward your specific goal.

Other email marketing goals include:
• Direct Selling
• Driving traffic to a Web site
• Driving traffic to an offline store or location
• Branding
• Brand Involvement
• Building Relationships

Assess Metrics to Benchmark
Once you’ve defined the goal of your campaign, you must identify the metrics that you will trend to evaluate performance. Are you currently tracking metrics? What are they? Are they actionable, i.e. metrics that offer you leverage in optimizing the campaign?

Metrics can include:
• Deliverability
• Spam Rate
• Acquisition Rate
• Open Rate
• Click Through Rate
• Unsubscribe Rate.

When we are benchmarking, there are two different approaches to use, both of which yield useful intelligence about our campaign performance. One is to benchmark performance against prior experience for this brand or marketing program. The other is to benchmark against industry norms. The first answers the question: “Are we doing better than we used to?” The second answers the question: “Are we doing as well as we should be?”

Most organizations begin by answering the first question because it is the information that is most easily obtainable. If you don’t have a history of tracking your performance metrics, there is no better time to start than the present. Then routinely evaluate your latest campaign against previous campaigns, especially those against similar lists or using similar tactics. By varying one aspect of the campaign at a time, you can build a valuable warehouse of marketing intelligence that will help you improve your campaigns on each iteration.

Industry statistics are harder to come by. But, if you can find statistics on your competitive set, that is most useful. Check with various marketing organizations that support your industry to see if they offer the information you need.

Delivery Rate
Deliverability is a metric that must be measured to determine whether or not your email is actually making its way to the intended recipient’s inbox. Optimization of this metric often includes monitoring for list fatigue as well as honoring the customer’s preferences.
In order to determine your deliverability, you should measure:
• Number of complaints
• Number of bounces
• Number of messages sent
• Size of the messages.

Spam Rate
Are you analyzing your campaign’s abuse report rate? This measurement gives valuable insight into the perception of your campaigns. Are your permission-based customers viewing messages as spam due to frequency or content? Do your opt-in recipients truly believe that they opted in to receive messages from you? Do they believe that they opted in for the type and frequency of messages you send them? Once you determine your campaign’s “spamminess,” try adjustments to message relevance, frequency, or call to action in order to reduce spam complaints. Ask your list members what they want and then honor those requests in your mailing activity.

Acquisition Rate
Whether qualifying an acquisition as a lead conversion or a purchase conversion, analyzing a campaign’s performance on cost per acquisition can be insightful. You may also wish to include a campaign’s conversion rate to aid in determining its effectiveness.

Open Rate
Are your messages being opened once delivered? Open rate is an important measure in determining the effectiveness of your subject line or the trust factor of your “from” address. Open rate is determined by the quantity of your email send versus those that open. Most email marketing providers trend this data for you.

Click-Through Rate
Your message has been opened, but are your customers responding to the content or call to action? By measuring your click through rate you can determine if the content is relevant to your customer and urges them to learn more. To establish your click through rate on a campaign, analyze the ratio of emails sent to the number of clicks.

Unsubscribe Rate
Are customers unsubscribing from your email campaigns at higher rates than previous historical trends? If the answer is yes, then it may be time to rethink your campaign’s frequency and relevancy. Measuring your unsubscribe rate is essential to keeping a “clean” list. Most providers monitor your unsubscribe rate to help you better understand your overall campaign performance. Determining your unsubscribe rate can be done at a campaign level or across all email marketing campaigns. To calculate your unsubscribe rate, measure the ration of sends to unsubscribes.

Ensure Deliverability
Legitimate email doesn’t always land in your customer’s inbox. 25% of business-to-consumer marketers say they’ve seen a significant increase in bounce rates. How do you ensure that your emails successfully reach your customer? Incorporating best practices into your email marketing will benefit your delivery. Monitoring your email campaign delivery rates, cleansing your data routinely, and requesting to be added to the customer’s address book are just a few ways to safeguard your email from landing in the spam filter. In addition, it’s critical to maintain a healthy relationship with the ISPs to which you are sending email. A trusted email marketing provider such as Monsoon Interactive takes care to constantly evaluate ISP relationships and address any issues that arise.

Spam
Spam is defined by Yahoo! Mail as “whatever consumers don’t want in their inbox”. Over time email marketing has evolved as less of a measurable definition of what spam is considered and more as a qualitative metric determined by the recipient. As an organization, you need to ensure that your email marketing focuses on your customers’ expectations including content preferences, relevancy, and frequency. If your customer finds no value in the email being delivered, regardless of opt-in, then it isn’t a good email. Are you viewing spam reports to determine if the messages you are delivering are the right message at the right time?

Test, Test, and Re-test
Testing is critical for email marketing success. Creating different landing experiences, offers, call to actions, imagery, and content allows you to optimize your campaign to its greatest potential. We’ve included two possible modes of testing:
• A/B testing: testing one element of a campaign against another. It may include varying the offer, call to action, look, or subject line of a message.
• Multivariate Testing: Testing multiple changes simultaneously in a live environment.

Relevancy
Delivering a message that doesn’t speak to the customer can disengage a valuable relationship. Email marketing has evolved from utilizing a one-off broadcast email campaign to employing a strategic program that targets the customer with a relevant message at the appropriate time. Consider this: according to Jupiter Research, “untargeted email campaigns have open rates of only 20%, a click through of only 9.5% and conversion rates of only about 1%. On the other hand, targeted email campaigns have a 33% open rate on average, a 14% click-through rate, and a conversion rate of 3.9%”. Engaging your audience with content and offers that are delivered strategically will uplift your message in an extremely competitive market. Creating a message that meets the needs of your customers enhances your relationship as well as reinforces your trust factor.

Segmentation
One of the most prevalent reasons for an email being ignored is irrelevant content. Segmentation ensures that your message is delivered at the right time, to the right person, with the right content. You can choose to segment your audience based on data such as behavior, preferences, or demographics. It’s important to collect the data through a list management tool so that it is easy to integrate segmentation within your campaign. Determine what segmentation meets the needs of your overall business objectives. Perhaps you choose to segment a campaign on the purchase value of a customer, or perhaps you believe a product-based segmentation will yield a higher return. Whatever your choice, make certain that the message and offer complement the segmentation.

Optimization
Now that you’ve determined your metrics and addressed the deliverability and relevancy of your campaign, it is time for optimization. Analyze your metrics and determine where there is opportunity to increase performance and convert low hanging fruit.

Your initial strategies may change, which means that you will need to continually adjust your campaign. Or, perhaps, the end goal you were hoping to achieve doesn’t yield the response you had hoped. Don’t be hesitant to shift resources.

Conversely, when you send out e-mails with a call to action that takes recipients back to a landing page, you don’t want to confuse those readers by sending them to a Web site that doesn’t look like the company you portray in your e-mail.

This happened to me recently. I got an e-mail from a major airline that featured a color scheme that was predominately the company’s trademark yellow and orange. Clicking through to the airline’s Web site, I was shocked to land on a page that was mainly blue and purple. My initial thought was that I was on the wrong page. What I learned is that the company rebranded its Web site but has not carried the new branding elements through to its e-mail program.

While it’s not unusual for companies to rebrand or to freshen their brand, it’s important to keep some of the old elements—at least on a temporary basis—to bridge to the new brand. You also need to make sure that your e-mail program catches up at the same time. This can be a struggle if e-mail marketing and your Web site are managed by different groups, but the outcome is worth the effort.

When designing your e-mails, look to your Web site for design elements and incorporate some of those elements into your e-mail. If you have an html Web site, you can even use elements from the Web site to easily design your e-mail.

Remember: it’s all about integrating the same look and feel from Web site to e-mail, and even to printed marketing materials. Carrying a similar look throughout all these customer touch points makes customers comfortable with your brand, which in turn makes them comfortable pulling out their wallets.

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What Email Can Learn from Social Networks

Expressing personality. Most brands can no longer afford to be faceless entities. The interactivity and transparency of the Internet has elevated the need for personality. Luckily, there are several ways to do this: You can use an executive as TigerDirect does, staff members like Crutchfield, or your customers like REI. The most poignant expression of personality I’ve seen recently is Backcountry’s memorial message for skier Shane McConkey.

Expressing a sense of community. People want discounts and helpful information, but many also want to be part of a community. Including product testimonials from product reviews on your site is one way to do this. Backcountry goes a step further and highlights its top contributors in its monthly newsletter.

Mark Brownlow of Email Marketing Reports recently suggested another way to build a community feel: adding social proof to your email sign-up process, such as a running count of how many subscribers you have. Thanks to blogs, Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn, subscriber counts are a well-established and highly promoted measurement of legitimacy and influence. I haven’t seen anyone try this yet, but the idea is intriguing.

What Social Networks Can Learn from Email

Providing exclusivity. Email subscribers appreciate it when they get exclusive deals and information not available to your Web site visitors. It helps justify them sharing their email address with you. With social networks, there’s a similar dynamic. Some people will ask themselves, “Why should I bother to be a fan if the announcements and other content are available on your Web site or to email subscribers?”

There’s value to making information available via different channels — being channel-agnostic is great m– but if you want to get people to engage with you via multiple channels, then the experience has to be different. Indeed, people expect to have a different experience with your brand via Facebook vs. Twitter vs. email, for instance.

Explaining the benefits of joining. Just as email sign-ups suffer when you don’t explain the benefits of receiving your emails, your “Find us on Facebook” or “Follow us on Twitter” call-to-action put the burden on your customers to explore the benefits themselves. Quickly listing the key benefits can be effective in getting people motivated to take action. In a recent email, Fingerhut did a good job of selling the benefits for engaging with the company on Facebook and Twitter.

Driving subscribers to other channels. Providing customers with many avenues to take advantage of offers and exposing them to different channels has well-established benefits. Just as email programs aren’t maximizing their opportunity when they drive traffic solely to the Web, self-contained social networks are destined to underperform. Look for occasions to expose customers to multiple channels. Sephora did that recently by asking email subscribers to share a digital gift (a tote bag) with their Facebook friends; if they did that, they could get a real Sephora tote from their local store. But the most impressive utilization of a brand’s channels that I’ve seen recently was Buy.com and its Tweet n Seek contest, which had participants following them on Twitter, searching Buy.com, visiting their Facebook page, and reading products pages.

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The quarterly analysis is compiled from more than 7 billion emails sent by Epsilon in October, November and December 2009, across multiple industries and approximately 170 participating clients. The analysis combines data from Epsilon’s proprietary platforms, DREAM and DREAMmail. Additional highlights from the study include the following:

• average click rate was 5.9 percent, up slightly from the same time last year (5.8 percent);

• during the high-volume holiday season, the average volume per client increased 25.8 percent from last quarter and 9.8 percent from last year;

• Epsilon’s client base had a 94.1 percent inbox deliverability rate for Q4 across a sample of U.S. and Canada commercial email; and

• nine of the 13 industries tracked saw increases in open rates over Q4 2008, and two of the 13, consumer products goods and consumer services telecommunications, reported increases in all three metrics — opens, clicks and nonbounce rate — compared to last year.

Perhaps I should not be so surprised at the level of confusion. Most marketers are just going with the reports they are being given.Most email broadcast systems report something called “delivered.” It’s usually a pretty high number — like 95% or 98.8%. That’s because it’s probably only telling you how many messages bounced, and nothing about how likely messages are to actually reach the inbox. Bounces are the number of records on your file that either no longer exist (a hard bounce) or are having temporary delivery failure (a soft bounce), perhaps due to an out-of-office reply or a full mailbox or some glitch in the ISP server.

Most marketers who keep their lists clean and have good permission practices have a bounce rate of 1% to 5%. So that “delivered” metric is high, and often stays high consistently. Since it’s the only number most ESPs provide, this lulls marketers into thinking they also have inbox deliverability under control. Those deliverability challenges they keep reading about? That must happen to other people.

What’s the number marketers really need to know? Inbox deliverability: How many messages actually reached the inbox so you can try to earn a response? Let’s be honest. Very few subscribers will search for your message in their junk folder or contact you if they didn’t receive it at all.

You know about spam filters and probably know that some of your email gets lost. However, many marketers don’t know the full extent of the problem. In fact, about 20% of email marketing messages globally never reach the inbox (source: Return Path client and ISP data). And if marketers think it couldn’t possibly happen to them, they are fooling themselves.

Twenty percent is a big number. Most marketers would be very pleased with the instant revenue boost that would result if all the response metrics — opens, clicks, purchases, downloads, page views — went up by 20% this week.

The fact is irrefutable: Email must reach the inbox if it has any hope of earning a response.

The good news for marketers is that the factors that go into whether your messages reach the inbox are under their control. They can improve inbox deliverability rates by following best practices around complaints, permission, list hygiene, blacklists, frequency, relevancy and yes, bounce processing. Marketers need to pay attention to what their reports actually say. And then they must be sure that they know the inbox deliverability, and know it by campaign and by domain (e.g.: Gmail vs. Yahoo). This data should be considered an addition to whatever your ESP or MTA reports as “delivered.”

Knowing that your bounce rate is low is a good thing. But it won’t guide you on optimizing response. If you don’t see inbox deliverability data, then ask for it.

By: Stephanie Miller
Source: Email Insider